IRBIL, Iraq — Iraq was on the brink of falling apart Thursday as al-Qaida renegades asserted their authority over Sunni areas in the north, Kurds seized control of the city of Kirkuk and the Shiite-led government appealed for volunteers to help defend its shrinking domain.

The discredited Iraqi army scrambled to recover after the humiliating rout of the past three days, dispatching elite troops to confront the militants in the central town of Samarra and claiming that it had recaptured Tikrit, the hometown of the late Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, whose regime was toppled by U.S. troops sweeping north from Kuwait in 2003.

But there was no sign that the militant push was being reversed. With the al-Qaida-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant now sweeping south toward Baghdad, scattering U.S.-trained security forces in its wake, the achievements of America’s eight-year war in Iraq were rapidly being undone. Iraq now seems to be inexorably if unintentionally breaking apart, into Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish enclaves that amount to the de facto partition of the country.

As the scale of the threat to the collapsing Iraqi state became clear, Obama administration officials met to discuss options for a response, including possible airstrikes.

The attempted government counteroffensive appeared to have only slowed the pace of the advance of the extremist army, which had headed south toward Baghdad after capturing the northern city of Mosul earlier this week. More than 90,000 Iraqi soldiers deserted rather than confront the militants, according to the official close to Maliki’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to talk to the media.

The official said the extent of the militants’ control of Tikrit had been exaggerated and that it is now back in government hands.

Even as the security forces attempted to regroup elsewhere, the government lost control of more territory in the northeast of the country, to Kurdish forces who took advantage of the chaos to assert control, unopposed, of the city of Kirkuk.

The government of the semiautonomous region of Kurdistan has long coveted Kirkuk, which sits atop a large if depleted reservoir of oil, as the capital of an independent Kurdish state. Successive Baghdad governments have pushed back against those aspirations, and the seizure of Kirkuk further exposed the helplessness of the central authorities.

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